Gone are the days, when users were forced to "learn how to use a computer"! Today, computers are learning human language and behaviour more than ever, making it very easy for beginners or all ages to use computing to their advantage. This is an era where our interaction with computers is changing fundamentally, from "Machine Centric" interaction to "Human Centric" interactions. With human interactions, our inputs have changed from mechanical inputs like keyboard and mouse to more natural elements such as a touch and voice.

Figure 1: Human Interactions in computing

Infusing Applications with Intelligence

The big question before technical decision makers is how do we leverage these technologies and infuse intelligence into existing applications. A well thought-out approach would make this journey enriching and fulfilling.

The low hanging fruit is to extend your enterprise applications with familiar experience to make them Expressive by enabling them with Voice, Touch or Inking capabilities. Most of our growing up life, we have used a Pen – to take notes, to solve equations, brainstorm ideas, whiteboard possibilities etc. It is just natural to then, to use Pen or Stylus or touch for computer based applications as well. Inking capabilities in Windows can enable us to write on our device just like we do on paper. Inking also converts the writing to editable text and can be mixed with Text, images etc. These capabilities can be extended to input forms of any line of business applications as well with the Ink SDK.

Applications should have the power of human language to and conversational Agents in the form of Bots. We have seen these agents in Cortana, Siri or Alexa, but now using Natural Language engines, such as LUIS.ai, we can bring these conversational interfaces with voice recognition and natural language interaction to enterprise applications and extend these applications to the most commonly used communication channel such as the web, facebook, skype, mobile applications, slack, Office 365 mail, Teams and even text or SMS. Exposing these agents or Bots across different channels requires significant pluming work, but tools like the Microsoft Bot framework make this really simple.

Cognitive understanding in applications lets them "see" and identify objects, people, emotions and actions, "hear" and recognize language, and "learn" and develop a greater understanding over time. Imagine the application being able to read hand-written notes on paper or printed text on images and converting it to text, imagine the application describing exactly what happened, based on photographs taken at the event, or transcribing speech in real-time without human intervention, or imagine voice based verification or imagine stabilizing shaking videos or even describing an entire video in real-time. The possibilities are endless and REST based APIs available in Cognitive Services can make these possibilities come to life.

Our business applications need to be enhanced with machine intelligence to achieve prescriptive and predictive analysis. Traditional business intelligence gives us the ability to analyses data and determine "What Happened and Why it happened", however Machine Learning and big data storage and processing in the cloud gives us the ability to predict "What will happen" and take corrective actions. Enhanced Visualizations using Power BI that has self service capability to slice and dice data interactively.

Figure 3: End-to-End integrated platform, tools and services to build intelligent applications

Security and Identity is a key aspect that should not be compromised in the endeavour to infuse applications with security. Remembering multiple passwords for multiple systems has always been an issue and they have inherent dangers of being cracked. Windows Hello, an enterprise grade biometric solution that can enable finger, iris or even face based authentication that meets government and defence regulatory requirements. These authentication engines, can easily be extended into your applications. We already see usage of Finger Print based authentication being used by many enterprise grade applications on the iPhone.

Conclusion

Human-centric technologies is fundamentally changing how we consume applications in our personal space and the same should also apply to how we consume business applications. Democratizing AI makes it really simple to infuse intelligence into enterprise applications and will go a long way in taking businesses forward.

Manifestation in the Microsoft ecosystem

IT Infrastructure On-Premise:

• Microsoft has made running and managing Linux workloads a fundamental part of their products. The enterprise management functionality in Configuration Manager, Virtual Machine Manager, and Data Protection Manager manages Linux right alongside Windows so that customers can have a single systems management infrastructure for their heterogeneous data center.
• System Center Operations Manager has supported Linux and UNIX monitoring since 2009 and support a hundred thousand servers in production today.  Now it also includes cross-platform systems management across Windows, UNIX, and Linux in part through working with an OSS technology called OpenPegasus. System Center management also manages open source middleware such as Tomcat, JBoss, Apache Web Server, and MySQL.
• Drivers for running Linux guests on Hyper-V became widely available for many distros in 2010, including running FreeBSD guests on Hyper-V.
• Microsoft is working with Zend, the commercial PHP company and the PHP community to ensure that the Windows Server operating system and other Microsoft products are great platforms for PHP applications and the open source PHP development language.

On the cloud

• Linux is a first-class citizen on Microsoft Azure Cloud, Partnership with RedHat has helped bring RHEL to Azure.
• Take for instance, Virtual machines running on Azure – 25% of these are Linux Virtual Machines. The Azure Marketplace has more than 1,000 Linux images. Azure supports CoreOS, CentOS, OEL SUSE, OpenSuse, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Ubuntu, RedHat Enterprise Linux on Azure.
• Azure gives first-class support for Java, Node.js, Python, Ruby, and PHP etc and open source DBs like MySQL and MongoDB. Azure also provides out-of-the box experience for open frameworks like Hadoop, web frameworks like Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal and provide first party SDKs for developing apps using Android, IOS or Windows phones.
• Azure Supports the Hadoop ecosystem and has implemented a 100% Hadoop service, called HDInsights that can be deployed on Linux in addition to Windows. Microsoft contributes to Apache Hadoop-related projects, including Tez, Stinger and Hive.
• Azure’s Open, RESTful API for every Azure Service help lighten up new scenarios, like Internet of Things (IoT) integration or Docker containers.
• Microsofts’ hybrid services have also included Linux e.g. Azure Site Recovery services between on-premises data centers and Azure.

Application Development lifecycle

• More than 500 projects have been initiated by Microsoft engineers releasing code to the developer community across IronRuby, IronPython, TypeScript, the .Net Framework and Xamarin Core and many more.
• Developers can now manage their application in the cloud with a host of popular open source DevOps tools such as Puppet, Chef, Vagrant, OpenShift, Terraform, Cloud Foundry, and more and supports deployment from Git, FTP, and TFS.
• Powershell Desired State Configuration (DSC) for Linux lets you do consistent configuration management across Windows and Linux and is available on Github. Microsoft engineers also built a Windows Subsystem for Ubuntu Linux in partnership with Canonical.
• Microsoft also contributes to a number of open standards specs such as: W3C, IETF, OASIS, ECMA, DMTF, and open source communities including: JQuery, MongoDB, Apache Cordova, Redis, Apache, Qpid, .NET Foundation, OpenJDK, Eclipse, Node.js, Cocos2d,  Web Platform Docs, Symfony, Doctrine, WebKit, GitHub, CodePlex and more.

Conclusion

IIM Udaipur is a relatively new IIM - just about four years old. Director Mr. Janat Shah puts his mission out loud and clear. He wants IIM Udaipur to carve out a niche for itself in the entrepreneur space and prepare its students for entrepreneurial endeavors. In this journey, the students, the professors and Director Shah leave no stone unturned. The institute has even included the option of trading their Summer Internship for an entrepreneurial Internship, where students can opt to give their ideas some shape and form before exiting from the institute - a first of its kind and very different from the placement oriented culture witnessed at most B-Schools.

Saksham - IIMU's entrepreneurship cell had organized a IT Entrepreneurship Summit on and I had the privilege of sharing some of my experiences as part of a panel discussion. It was indeed a very enthusing discussion. We discussed internal changes that have happened in the IT industry over the past few years in the context of evolution of IT from an add on to a necessity. We discussed some of the factors that have led to this tremendous growth that we see in this space today. We discussed changes in the ecosystem as a whole - from socio-economic factors, govt. regulations, ease of getting investors etc. with a view of what should be expected in the future for entrepreneurs in India. An interesting part of the discussion was whether we expect top IT cities to become the Start-up valley like the silicon valley and what the panel thought about global expansion by some Indian Unicorns.

Here's a quick summary of my thoughts discussed at by the panel. Am keeping away from using examples discussed during the conversation in this write-up.

On things to consider while starting out on your own venture : Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

1. Feasibility of your ideas given the constraints that arise from socio-economic factors are important to evaluate. Many ideas much ahead of its time just die and therefore it is important to ensure that the ecosystem is ready for your idea. Considerations should include mature and pervasive technology, consumer mind-set that is has played around with ideas similar in nature etc.
2. Alternatively, your idea needs to be so disruptive that it creates an ecosystem by itself. Apples iPad or Microsofts Hololens or Tesla Power Wall is a great example of disruptive ideas creating an ecosystem.
3. Build a compelling USP for your venture. Carve out a Niche that your venture will be known for. This comes with deep understanding of ones own expertise and equally good understanding of your competition

On is this the right time : If you have assessed your risks and benefits well, the opportunity in todays "growth hungry enterprises" as well as the "real India" is massive

1. India is in high growth mode. All economic parameters are looking good. GDP is high, Fiscal deficit is low, FDI is high, interest rates are low, revenues are up, Inflation is down and the Rupee is stable. In such an economy, one is capable of taking very high risks with little risk of failure.
2. Technological Innovation is breaking all boundaries. Internet of things, BigData, Analytics, Sensors are opening up new opportunities for people to build tech enabled solutions that can help drive better business decisions and therefore very high growth. Large Industries and Businesses are going through a self-transformation to align their IT functions (CTO, CIO) better to the changing tech landscape to derive as many benefits as they can. The Government has exposed critical Data for people to build solutions with for social good.
3. Initiatives like Digital India and Smart Cities are helping technology and knowledge to permeate to the "Parallel India", which is very different in characteristics from the metro cities that we live in. This "Parallel India" is the "Real India" which is large and populous is looking to solve its problems with a technology enabled solutions. The Indian government also wants to make citizen services available electronically and helping boost these initiatives. The next set of disruptive solutions and ideas are going to come from all parts of this "Real India”. Impact of this change is much beyond Metro Cities and IT Hubs. 

On changing times from the dotcom era : Slow and Steady, Consumer focused approach. Profits are not a near-term goal. Ecosystem support & Global footprint.

1. Re-defining consumer behavior : The start-up ecosystem across the globe is redefining usage of technology, and interaction of their end customers with their products and service. As an example, today most eCommerce ventures are bleeding as they redefine buying experiences, re-organize and optimize supply chain (distribution, warehouses, last mile delivery etc.) and onboard sellers. Such a transformation costs monies and takes times. But Angel Investors and VC's are not in a hurry to make profits and are able to pump-in enough funds to give start-ups a longer lease of life to help this transformation.
2. Massive support and Inclusive ecosystem : This era is where the support ecosystem for new ventures as come of age. From Angel Investors, VCs - Indians and outside, Accelerators, Incubators, Mentors to Govt. subsidy, large corporates offering benefit program such as BizSpark to render technical help, institutes - both technical and management - nurturing entrepreneurship cells are building a fully inclusive ecosystem to support start-ups. Entrepreneurs are not afraid of sharing their ideas and seeking validation from peers. In fact, Start-ups leverage each other and build on the other's strengths to grow bigger. Fresh graduates from premier institutes prefer to undertake volatile jobs in a start-up instead of a stable job with large corporation. Acceptance from family to run or be a part of the start-ups is a huge driving factor in todays times. Stability is no longer "cool". There is a "Growth Mindset" being energized across the country
3. Conquering Global footprint : Following the footsteps of large Indian enterprises and tech giants, Indian start-ups are building massive operations outside of India via organic growth or via Mergers and Acquisitions. This has never happened before, but India is truly starting to show its "true potential".

On challenges that may hinder growth : Fail fast, Succeed faster!

1. Start-ups follow herd mentality : Dr. Mohandas Pai says only 10% start-ups would be successful, which I believe is true, if budding entrepreneurs don’t think out of the box. There are too many "Me Too" start-ups – emulating successful ones in India or abroad. This behavior is also driven by "certain" Angel Investors and VCs that prefer to take safer bets than look for disruptive ideas and take risks and may become a great hindrance to the expected boom.
2. It is important to try out the market sentiment before you go out to build your entire product. Starting with a minimum viable product and building your customer base. Your first 1000 customers should be your demi-Gods as they will help define your offer. Build a Network, learn, research, pivot if needed, Be Agile and Nimble.
3. “Startup” is a situation which requires a certain set of management skills. 70% of start-ups are below 35 yrs! It is important to have a person from the Industry who has served their time in the corporate world and believes in your idea to be your mentor, guide or even the CEO. Let this person help build your customer acquisition strategy, financial model, marketing strategy, growth plan etc. Let this person help you become a lean start-up optimizing on all resources available out there.

The good part is today with the massive ecosystem to support entrepreneurs and the advances that technology has made, the potential is limitless.

I do hope this discussion was fruitful for the attendees and helps the institute in their mission to put entrepreneurship at the fore.

In the room, we figured that almost everyone had a start-up idea, which is great! Most successful entrepreneurs always think of the business model and revenue model for their idea, before taking the plunge. The business model will certainly evolve overtime as the idea starts taking shape and form, but one should always have a view of the how you intend to develop your market, your customer base and make monies. This is even more important, if you intend to attract investments from external sources. The one thing missing was awareness of the various stages that a start-up goes through from a financing perspective.

Thought it would make sense to pen this down for interested folks! Disclaimer : The depiction below is for basic understanding of the growth and financing process and should not be considered "God's word" :)

The picture below should help understand the different growth stages that the start-up goes through along with their financing sources.

Bootstrapped/Initial : This is the first stage of a new business. The entrepreneurs plan to give the idea some shape or form and go thru market research, product development typically a MVP (minimum viable product) for demos, acquiring the first customer, testing their product so on. At this stage, entrepreneurs utilize their own funds or seeks help from friends, family and well-wishers to move forward. In financing terms, this is the Seed Stage of the start-up. Entrepreneurs at this stage may also get Govt. or Development group grants as Seed investments. At this point it is important to keep costs low, offer sweat equity to contributors, seek as much help as possible from experts in technology and the domain that you operate in.

Early Stage : As the idea starts developing into a formal business, the entrepreneurs are focused on generating commercial value from its product or service and validating the business viability with a few customers. Learning quickly, accommodating changes and time to market are key focus areas. This is where Angel Investors come in for a small equity in the business. Angel investors are typically high net-worth individuals with capital available for the purpose of investment in smaller businesses. Angel Investors often come together to form an Angel Network, which pools resources, makes informed decisions and offers advice to their portfolio ventures.

Growth Stage : A market ready product that is focused on accelerating market adoption via a focused customer acquisition strategy although there may not be profits coming in, define this stage. During the growth phase, the start-up is innovating fast thru as they grow their business. The entrepreneurs at this stage, focus on investing in the right talent, scaling the infrastructure and operations and invest heavily in marketing activities.
The growth stage is typically funded by Venture Capitalists in multiple series of funding. With each round of funding, the business goes thru formal valuation which is further enhanced by the amount invested against the equity offered. The VC funding often accelerate business operations and the management team can now focus on the core business without worrying about dwindling cash flows. Venture capital funding goes thru multiple rounds and are typically named as Series 'A', 'B', 'C', 'D' etc. with each series attracting a higher corpus and proportionally increasing the valuation of the company. The series funding is highly publicized activity, and at this time the entire ecosystem is watching the venture very closely. Over the time, the venture breaks even, starts making profits and in many cases goes thru a well planned acquisition strategy for in-organic growth.

Exit : With a strong and growing customer base, repeat business taking off, we now have a fairly mature business. The entrepreneurs, VCs, Angels and the management teams are seeking to exit the venture with high profits or Return on their investment with strategic acquisitions or an IPO in the open market. Before the final exit strategy, investors look for bridge loans also known as mezzanine round to help manage the IPO or go through an acquisition. Most start-ups do not get into an exit strategy at all, they focus on growth, expansion and diversification as strategies to sustain their ventures.

Throughout this process, it is important for the entrepreneurs to be focused on making their idea real and viable in the long-terms.

Here’s to building a strong start-up ecosystem in India!

Mobile Application Development Strategy

Phase-wise development of apps

Functional Considerations

App functionality is typically defined by the business processes, however App features is something we can define to increase app experience. In addition, define the device capabilities you would like to use. Some of the features you could consider are as follows

Core Features	Additional functionalities	Device Capabilities
Search Box 4 Tile Sizes Supports Landscape and Portrait Views Snap View - 500px Search Share Live Tiles Semantic Zoom and gestures Multi-lingual	Secondary Tiles Push Notifications Mail App Integration Calendar App Integration Skype / Lync/ Bing Maps Integration Animations/Transitions Offline Capabilities Multi-Touch Gestures Sing le-Sign On Roaming Profiles	NFC / Bluetooth connectivity Accelerometer Gyro meter Wallet Lock Screens Location Services Augmented Reality

Design Considerations

Since we are catering to varying devices and form factors, it is important to define a common architecture that apps must follow.

Considerations

Responsive Design – Define ground rules and patterns to use to ensure the app scales beautifully for different resolutions, devices sizes and orientation (Landscape/Portrait)

Use of gestures to increase user productivity – Pan, Zoom, Flip, Rotate etc.

UX & UI – Build Rich and engaging UX for apps. Do not ignore the UX. Mobile apps require us to shift from the traditional breadcrumb model, make good use of the real-estate available, minimize use of keyboard and increase use of touch. Define a base template that caters to branding needs of the enterprise and then give the designers a freehand to create innovative, productive designs.

Technical Considerations

Always connected devices depend on network speed and latency. It is important to build applications for zero connectivity, however that does not suit every business process. Also, upkeep of applications are largely dependent on how they are development

Considerations

Define characteristics that help determine the type of apps - Native apps, Hybrid and Browser based apps. Native applications are rich and responsive; utilize every platforms core hardware and software capabilities and OS resources fully. It is an un-matched user experience and should be the solution of choice.

Define characteristics that help determine what type of apps should be always connected and what type of apps could use offline capability with periodic sync

Build Once Strategy - Will you use cross platform frameworks like Xamarin or Cordova or would you maintain separate projects for each OS that you support. The recommendation is to choose a platform like Xamarin that builds on top of Visual Studio and leverages C# and .Net skills to develop and deploy natively for iOS, Android and Windows

App Certifications – Although these apps would be deployed via company portals, adhere to certification guidelines provided by Windows store. This will ensure compliance to performance, suspend & resume time and effective utilization of device resources.

Updates & Refreshes – Define a primary ALM tool that you would use for managing updates to the app and publishing refreshes. The codebase needs to be coordinated across multiple form-factors and devices. Visual Studio provides best in class source code control and ALM overall and can be used for Apps + Hybrid development with cloud and on premise applications.

Identity & Access control – Define Single – Sign On experience, regardless of location. Think about letting users access external resources via Active Directory Federation What will be the Authentication mechanism for apps using corporate resources Define the baseline to ensure every app developer implements the same mechanism Define which group of users have access to what type of apps and what level of access. Define how this will be enabled via Access control and Authentication

Mobile Apps Distribution Strategy

Distribution of apps to user devices can be done in one of the following ways: 1. Directly from the OS vendors store – Windows Store, Apple Store, Android Store etc. This is the most preferred approach as all the plumbing work related to updates notifications, performance and security, Quality, reviews, feedback, ratings etc. is taken care of by the infrastructure. Windows store also provides for auto updates, which means new updates are directly pushed to the device w/o waiting for users to sign-in. However, this requires enterprise apps exposed to all users across the globe – which may not be appreciated despite being access controlled 2. Side-Loaded via private store w/o having to unlock the device in question or pre-loaded by the OEMs A company portal which is a private store can be enabled via robust MDM solutions such as Windows Intune and System Center. While an MDM means additional investment, it provides for a secure environment to distribute, manage and control enterprise apps. Pre-Loaded apps by the OEMs require some sort of maintenance for upgrades and should be best achieved via an MDM

Considerations for MDM solution for apps distribution

How will users provision apps? What control measures would be in place? Some apps may need to be force deployed on users devices for compliance reasons.

Define the strategy for a private store. Windows Intune offers this out of the box using Company Portal – which is a self-service tool for installing apps

How will you distribute and update apps and policies?

Usage Reports - Provides usage information and help identify under- or over-used resources and prioritize package replication.

What happens when a device gets lost or the employee leaves the org? You need your MDM to wipe out all corporate assets from that device – Apps + Data

How will you ensure data encryption on the device?

Mobile Device Management

Security of devices, encryption of data and manageability is most important when devising a mobility strategy. Even in BYOD scenarios, you need a tighter control over devices that access corporate resources. Usage of mobile devices must be controlled with IT managed tools, in compliance with corporate security policies. If a device cannot be managed or controlled, it should not be able to access corporate resources. In addition to Apps, mobile devices can also ask for browser based access to corporate network. Therefore, enterprise IT also has to manage enrollment and management of devices onto their environment. Enterprise IT must:

• Secure devices such that only registered devices are allowed access to the network and apps. These devices must conform to specified security standards
• Access levels are determined by policies enforced – such as only encrypted devices get access to all internal resources. Non encrypted devices may access Low Business Impact networks.

Conclusion

A successful implementation of Enterprise mobility has the following key characteristics:

• Enable device choice, Consistent and Rich end user experience
• Greater access to information, with and yet protect corporate assets.
• Flexibility for app provisioning on devices, updates and maintenance, anytime, anywhere.
• Granular control of devices, data and apps
• Get a single view across your entire environment
• Build on existing investment and reduce complexity for the user and IT administration, manage costs to decrease the total cost of ownership of mobility initiatives

Therefore key to success is effective planning and selection of the rights products to enable management of enterprise mobility.

Preparing the enterprise for mobility

Define your business goals

This considerations vary from industry to industry, size of the organization and other demo-graphics. However establishing a clear goal and a set of objectives is imperative for the way forward. 

Mobility Profiling

While most people know how to use smart devices, they need to be told how to use them smartly. Mobility profiling is the keystone for defining the strategy. It will help assess and improve employee productivity and satisfaction, customer engagement and cost reduction.

Preparing LOB apps to expose data and business logic securely:

 Define target platform to support

The mobility ecosystem is massive. The operating systems itself are largely fragmented with multiple version of the OS to support. Esp. with Android, many of the OEMs have their own implementation of the OS in addition to the OS itself being available in multiple versions. Supporting all these versions wouldn’t make practical sense. Therefore, the recommendation is to follow a general rule of three

• Support the Top 3 Operating System that your workforce uses
• Support the latest version in each OS, encourage users to update the latest version
• Build OEM level relationship with Top 3 Device OEMs

Monitoring, Success Criteria & Metrics

An enterprise must monitor its implementation closely. It is imperative to define success criteria for mobility initiatives and periodically measure its implementation towards a certain metrics aligned to objectives stated earlier

In Part 3 of this series, we will evaluate aspects of application development & deployment.

GSMA announces that the proliferation of connected devices will create a US$1.2 Trillion Revenue Opportunity for Mobile Operators by 2020. In addition, statistics from various sources tell us the following:

The place where people work is no longer exclusively the workplace. People expect to have the ability to work where, when and how they choose, using the devices they love, enabled by apps they are familiar with. Such proliferation of devices provide for a unique opportunity of defining new age mobile workforce and connecting employee-supplier-vendor-customer network.

People Centric Approach to Enterprise mobility

This trend comes with associated risks of managing enterprise infrastructure efficiently and calls for huge shift in the mind-set of the IT organization. The need of the hour is for every CIO is to move away from device-centric approach to people-centric approach as shown above of preparing the enterprise for mobility.

The CIO needs address present and future business needs, within a secure environment and yet add value to the workforce and deliver experiences that surpass expectations.

The IT needs to not only provision enterprise applications for their employees but enable corporate technology and resources that are always on from any device, anywhere, while complying to security protocols, controlling costs, and accelerating time to market. It’s a tough ask!

A well thought-out mobility strategy will help an enterprise identify and address many of the above challenges and execute entire mobility lifecycle from building apps to device management effectively.

This strategy should contain several facets of mobility such as target mobile platforms to support, device procurement strategy, mobile apps baseline architecture, design philosophy, application development strategy, security of apps, data and devices, device management strategy, disconnected scenarios, preferred development and OEM Vendors and user support.

We therefore divide the approach to mobility into four distinct phases:

• Preparing the enterprise for mobility: This involves creating a master blue print of how the enterprise embraces BYOD scenarios and includes careful planning of devices to support, a phase-wise approach to enable for mobility and measurement criteria.
• Mobile Application development strategy: Apps define the experiences that users carry and perceptions built about effectiveness of mobility enablement. The app development strategy should define set of considerations for building native, hybrid, browser based apps, usage of device capabilities, building rich user interfaces, development methodology and a lot more.
• Mobile application distribution strategy: forms the key to how users – employees, vendors, and customers receive the applications built for them. While most customer have solutions to automate and manage deployment to enterprise controlled PCs, mobiles and non-domain joined machines pose new challenges.
• Mobile Device Management strategy: forms the key to managing devices that connect to the enterprise IT.

In the next part, Let us evaluate considerations of each of these in brief.